I am 100% convinced that the college debt bubble is going to make the housing bubble

[Julius_Seizeher]

People are not poor because they are victims, or because someone else ripped them off, or because the big boy world is unfair and mean.

Wealth is not good or evil; there's nothing moral about it. Wealth is simply the measure of a person's contribution to the economy.

People are poor because they contribute little or nothing to our CAPITALISTIC society. Those who contribute nothing, receive nothing. Those who make the greatest contributions receive the greatest rewards.

Why do I have to explain this to any so-called grown-ass man? I pity any man who was not so fortunate to grow up on a farm like I did; nowhere else will you receive the lesson on CHARACTER that I was so fortunate to receive. A farmer cannot sew thistles and expect to reap corn; nor can a MAN sit on his ass and blame everyone else for his problems and expect to acquire wealth.

 

[highconscienceness]

bubble shmubble
bringing down USA is what it's all about
Listen to some satanic metal lyrics, they talk about **** that's going on right now, for example Key of Mythras, or Ministry. Another one is reggae, for example Israel Vibrations.


Economically you folks are going to be in a bred line. But there will be a war of 2012. Will it bring you out, or will it destroy the world. I'm no prophet so I don't know. One thing I can tell you, Russia tested your missile defense shield a few days back by crashing several satellites near your grounds.

It's the end of the world you see, and engineered one. They going to bring in an anti christ, not a man, a system.


All in all it's a pagan ritual.

 

[Martin Shabazz Jr.]

I...
I have no remorse...the whole "must-go-to-college" racket needs to be brought to its knees. Another by-product of an over-revved economy brought on by Clinton-era lending practices and Greenspan in there d!cking around with Fed rates.

Just curious but what do you mean by the "must-go-to-college" racket?

 

[Speculator E]

People are not poor because they are victims, or because someone else ripped them off, or because the big boy world is unfair and mean.

Wealth is not good or evil; there's nothing moral about it. Wealth is simply the measure of a person's contribution to the economy.

People are poor because they contribute little or nothing to our CAPITALISTIC society. Those who contribute nothing, receive nothing. Those who make the greatest contributions receive the greatest rewards.

Why do I have to explain this to any so-called grown-ass man? I pity any man who was not so fortunate to grow up on a farm like I did; nowhere else will you receive the lesson on CHARACTER that I was so fortunate to receive. A farmer cannot sew thistles and expect to reap corn; nor can a MAN sit on his ass and blame everyone else for his problems and expect to acquire wealth.

LOL. What an ignorant and naive view of the world. This prove my theory that people who are dumb in one subject tend to be dumb in others.

 

[Alle_Gory]

People are not poor because they are victims, or because someone else ripped them off, or because the big boy world is unfair and mean.

Of course not. How silly of me. This never happened before.

People are poor because they contribute little or nothing to our CAPITALISTIC society. Those who contribute nothing, receive nothing. Those who make the greatest contributions receive the greatest rewards.

You're right, read on to see why.

Why do I have to explain this to any so-called grown-ass man? I pity any man who was not so fortunate to grow up on a farm like I did; nowhere else will you receive the lesson on CHARACTER that I was so fortunate to receive. A farmer cannot sew thistles and expect to reap corn; nor can a MAN sit on his ass and blame everyone else for his problems and expect to acquire wealth.

Remember, farmers are poor because they contribute nothing. You and your old man made very little money. But some hot shot trader playing with paper money? He's more valuable than you. He makes more money.

A politician? Leagues ahead of you. His net worth from back room dealings with his corporate buddies contributes more to society than you and your father growing food. You're completely worthless compared to these wonderful people, I agree with you.

 

[Alle_Gory]

Paper money? All money is paper. A traders buys from willing sellers and sells to willing buyers......how exactly does that create poor people?

That's not what I'm arguing about. I'm just pointing out Julius's hypocrisy using his own philosophy. The "contribution" of the wealthy isn't always more than the contribution of the workers.

The reason they are wealthy is because they pay the worker less than what the work is worth (in alot of cases, not all) and then skim off the top. I've seen people become wealthy simply because they were smart and hired the right people to do the work for them. It has nothing to do with how hard a worker you are, or how much you contribute.

I agree totally on the politician. But again, the answer isn't to take all of the money from every "rich" guy but to instead punish the selling of Government Favors.

You're right. That is not fair either. Punish the many for the crimes of the few is unjust.

Farmers have it tough, not because they provide nothing, but because they are in a market with thin margins and generally a large supply. When you push the supply curve to the right (due to excess quantities), it brings prices down and lowers margins. Of course, one still has to go with the general thought that farmers are poor, which is no necessarily true.

Look into lobster farming, margins, and the middlemen inflating prices. You know why lobster meat is so expensive? It's not because of the farmers/fishermen. They were making so little money, and the wholesalers so much money a few years ago that the farmer went directly to the restaurants and the grocers causing prices to fall like a rock to what lobster SHOULD cost.

It's not always a matter of cost and demand. People like to manipulate to make more money. I blame the middlemen that don't add value. They're a real problem.

 

[Alle_Gory]

The reason they are wealthy is because they know how to turn a Raw Material (Labor plus some other Good) into a finished good that is in demand by the public, and to do it in a way where they have excess capital.

If I had the money, I could just hire some people to do that. Would it make me wealthy? Yes. Would it make me wealthy because of my own contribution, success and hard work? No.

Therefore, the wealthy are not more successful, and they aren't more deserving. It's just a matter of being shrewd... and some of them actually do put in the hours to make a fortune by their own hand. Overall the real world doesn't care about fairness, or contributions or any of that.

The undeserving have, and the deserving have not. See the welfare mom example of undeserving who have. It happens in all economic classes.

It is ALWAYS about supply and demand. Sure people may try to manipulate others into buying at a better price but the only way they can shift the supply or demand curve is by changing their product, or changing their production output.

Middlemen add value in many cases, otherwise they would not be used. The problem with middlemen is that often they don't realize they can price themselves out, much like you allude to in your statement above.

The laws of supply and demand do not matter in a monopolistic or oligopolistic market. Look at lobsters. Yup, they really screwed the pooch on that one, priced themselves out when they squeezed the farmers too hard. There goes the oligopoly and prices! Now that lobster REALLY IS worth $5 per pound. The same could happen in the oil market. A barrel of oil is NOT worth $100 nor does the law of supply and demand dictate it should be $100.

What dictates it? Commodities trading artificially creates a 'demand' which causes the price to shoot up. When the oil levels get too low, suddenly you have tankers sitting in the middle of the ocean full of crude because people want to manipulate the supply. You also have traders who buy and sell on the market screwing around with the demand. It's not a real demand for the product. It's a demand to hold onto it. Artificial.

When you know how the system works, you can screw with it.

The only way to avoid the above scenarios is to ensure perfect competition, or as much as possible. This is the government's job, but they drop the ball like usual.

What many people don't realize, is that high margins, while good for your bootom line at first, are also fertilizer for competition. If you want people attacking your market-share, charge a higher price and they will come.

Not if you buy out the competition.

 

[Julius_Seizeher]

Who said farmers were poor? Most of the farmers I know are millionaires.

Farmers get squeezed when they don't have control over their resource. In the grain business, it's all about who owns the land. If you own the land, your 500 acres can be more profitable than 1500 rented. What we're seeing in grain farming is mass, non-corporate consolidation; most of the small farmers just rent to the cowboys now. My immediate family farms 1500 acres that were paid for 50 years ago, and my cowboy cousins own and mostly rent 3000+. We own a million in equipment, a small fleet of trucks, it's a big machine now. The big guys have razor-thin margins for the rents that they pay, because inputs have gotten so high: seed, fuel, potash, everything has gotten crazy high.

Those lobster farmers got squeezed because they had no control over their resource; they just shipped 'em. It's a business that requires a leaner and more sophisticated distribution channel than the mass-commodity grain infrastructure; you've got lots of trucking and refrigeration. The farmers had no skin in the distribution game; that's what they needed. When they started dealing with restaurants, they cut out the guys who got fat doing the other half of their business.

And as for this sniveling little bastard crawling on my feet, you have your reward.

 

[The Inside Man]

Who said farmers were poor? Most of the farmers I know are millionaires.

Most farmers in general are not millionaires. I am surrounded by them and no one is driving a lexus or bmw, let alone the kinds of cars millionaires drive. They don't even have new trucks.

If you had not been born on a farm, and your father had not been in your life, do you think you might have a different worldview?

If you had been born in a bad hood, your father was not around, your mother was on drugs (all things that are out of your control as a child), and you had bullet holes in your front door and occasionally saw a dead body before the police cleaned it up, do you think that you might possibly have a different view of the world shaped by different experiences?

 

[Poonani Maker]

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio

 

[Alle_Gory]

And as for this sniveling little bastard crawling on my feet, you have your reward.

I would be much nicer and respectful if you were a decent person, the opposite of a prick.

Anyways, good for you that your family is wealthy. But one wealthy farmer doesn't mean that all farmers are wealthy. Be glad that land runs in your family, but that doesn't mean it runs in all families. Are they less deserving then? Do they contribute less to society because they make less money (because they have to rent the land to produce)?

You seem to think that wealth is a sign of a person's value and contribution.

 

[Wilko]

Danger is on the money. My employer values my 40 hours per week more than the 75K per year he pays me, I value the 75K per year more than the 40 hours per week I work for him, we both win. It's a strictly voluntary transaction, noone is coercing either us, no altruism required.

Wealth redistribution has a lousy track record in the real world, it's a disincentive to production, not to mention the unpredictable and uninteded consequences. Unfettered capitalism produces better results in the real world, its failure is that it doesn't have the same warm, gooey, self-satisfying appeal that socialism offers the chattering classes. In the marketplace of international economies people and capital don't move from freer to more regulated economies.

I'd like to see a miniscule flat tax on consumption to pay for a government with vastly reduced powers and responsibility. That would make me happy.

 

[Alle_Gory]

Wealth redistribution has a lousy track record in the real world, it's a disincentive to production, not to mention the unpredictable and uninteded consequences.

Yes it does. However fair wages for labour don't. The market should dictate fair wages, assuming it's fair and not distorted by the various players.

Unfettered capitalism produces better results in the real world, its failure is that it doesn't have the same warm, gooey, self-satisfying appeal that socialism offers the chattering classes.

Unfetterd capitalism is as bad as communism. It leads to ruin. In a fully capitalist market, monopolies form as companies buy each other out and grow bigger. Soon there's only a pond with a few big fish eating the small ones who want to enter.

Capitalism works as long as there is government oversight. Non-corrupted and fair government oversight to maintain perfect competition and prevent companies playing dirty to gain advantages.

I'd like to see a miniscule flat tax on consumption to pay for a government with vastly reduced powers and responsibility. That would make me happy.

Well, all the money does go to consumption at one point, so it might work.

 

[backbreaker]

Girl's family are farmers. I have to side with JS on this one. They just have a different mindset, don't really value the things that I for instance value. I don't know the exact net worth of them, dont' really care to know, but I know my fiancee gets a check every month and will for the rest of her life directly to her bank account, a check big enough she can life off off, not rich but not poor either, I have never seen her father in anything but overalls. don't give a **** about new cars lol.

 

[Wilko]

Alle Gory, I'm with you brother. Actually I think my differences with you are so trivial as to almost be not worth discussing, but who knows, I might learn something in the process.

Unfettered capitalism was a crude way of saying perfect markets, markets where all participants have perfect market information
and no participant has the power to arbitrarily fix prices. Under current conditions I don't think perfect markets arise spontaneously but I think that may have as much to do with Governments picking winners and special interest groups courting favour for their industry/union. I suspect it's those kinds of distortions that lead to the creation of monopolies. Like Danger, I also think that new players will enter the market with a competitive edge.

I think Government can have a role in encouraging the growth of perfect markets through the prosecution of fraudulent business practice, the removal of protective subsidies and by allowing bad businesses to fail, no matter how large.

Does the market require Government intervention in the form of monopoly busting? Would destructive monopolies form in the absence of special favours? Those are really interesting questions. I suspect that however well intentioned the interventions they would lead to unintended consequences likely to be as bad as the problem they sought to address.

Oh, I noticed you talked about the market setting a fair wage, there was no suggestion of an enforced minimum wage, correct?

Another interesting idea for income tax I liked was a single flat tax rate above a particular threshold, below which there was a negative income tax. For every dollar the citizen earned below $20K he was subsidized say 25%. Considerable assistance and incentive for low income earners and no disincentive for middle-high income earners. Flat taxes have the advantage of higher compliance rates, my understanding is they tend to increase government revenue where they've been implemented, not that that I think Government should be stealing even more money from its citizens!

 

[FutureSpartan]

Some of you guys need to reexamine this whole idea that a measure of a human being's worth in society is the amount of money they earn.

No one can estimate the massive intangible contribution to society social workers, police officers, firefighters, civil engineers, soldiers, teachers provide yet many of them average 40-60k a year. So by your twisted belief system they are somehow inferior and not contributing to society as much as a Wall St. banker or a corporate lawyer. Yes all of them provide a service to society but to use income earned from their professions as the only metric of human worth is downright Machiavellian.

How many entrepreneurs and self-made multi-millionaires would have been successful had there been no infrastructure, legal system to protect property rights, municipal services, education system to provide a highly trained workforce, regulations to prevent unethical businessmen from gaining an unfair advantage, etc....

Some of you guys seem to forget we live in a society. The free market is simply the sum of society's wants, needs, and desires and the businesses people set up to provide for them. There is no such thing as a "self-made" man. No man is an island. We all contribute to each others success and failure

Let me ask you this Julius S. Who is going to come to your barn if its on fire or your crops being robbed if everyone was too busy trying to be the next billionaire? As a "self-made" man that can do everything by himself without the contributions of others, would you have been willing to bear the full costs of protecting your farm?

 

[FutureSpartan]

As far as which system is ideal for society....both idealized systems (communism and free markets) require idealized people to make it work.
A genuine free market is the same thing as the workers' paradise, an impossible, and naive, fantasy.

The answer is somewhere in the middle.

 

[Alle_Gory]

If a person's contribution to society is measured with money, what about thieves?

They have LOTS of money, do they contribute to society?

The answer is clearly NO. The fortune contributes to themselves, they are the bane of society because they are a leech.

 

[Wilko]

Future Spartan, I read back through the thread and I didn't see the advocates for freer markets suggesting anything along the lines of "human beings worth in society is the amount of money they earn." or, "income earned from their professions as the only metric of human worth". You are misrepresenting those of us advocating freer markets.

The entrepeneur might make windfall profits and the rich may get richer but that doesn't mean the poor get poorer. Absolute standards of living for all still go up overtime when free markets are allowed to operate, goods become cheaper to buy. When poverty is arbitrarlily defined as the lowest 10th percentile of income and you become fixated on the distribution of wealth you loose sight of what's really happening. It may not feel particularly fair that wealth is concentrated in the hands of relatively few but free markets are still the most effective way to do the greatest common good and an uneven distribution of wealth is one of the consequences. It's not unfair, it just is. I would say the measure of success for an economic system is how much it improves absolute standards of living, I think freer economies are doing that better than centrally controlled or regulated economies and it makes a strong case for keeping regulation to a minimum.

 

[Wilko]

I'm a uniformed member of the military which puts me in this category of worker, "social workers, police officers, firefighters, civil engineers, soldiers, teachers" I think defence MIGHT be one of the few legitimate functions of Government but I'm prepared to look at alternatives.

The waste, largesse and inefficiency in defence is profound! If we actually had to compete within a market to provide those services, we would get buried. That service could easily be provided cheaper and more efficiently to the tax paying citizen but we don't because we're a natural monopoly and have no incentive to change. What is defence actually worth to the nation? Do we give the taxpayer 20 billion dollars of value each year? What is the economic cost of not having defence? Do we need new roads or more destroyers, which is worth more to the taxpayer, which gives them greater benefit? We can ask those questions of any public sector enterprise and we should. What is education worth? What is health-care really worth? Markets give us that information, without that information it's impossible to correctly allocate resources and waste or scarcity ensues.

The main point of a market for "defence" is that we would end up with the right amount of defence. For our current and forseeable needs I think we have an oversupply of defence but the public is forced to buy up the surplus it doesn't need at an artificially inflated price and the same is probably true for other services provided by Government.